Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 145 of 479
BUMP
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I used to think that Vietnam warped SECOND.
After his unusually honest post where he admitted that he never intended to be "good" I now realize that shooting people from a helicopter, risk free, liberated the evil in him. And he believes that his mission in life is a continuation of that: To punish, hopefully kill, "evil" people, as long as there's no personal risk to himself.
Even tho he's a would-be killer, he separates himself from "evil" people bc
1) He's a Democrat
2) He lives a healthy lifestyle
3) He pays his taxes (!!!)
4) He's rich, and only good/smart people prosper
So he can continue his "war" (He believes he's fighting a holy war; he said so. And all is fair in war...) without having to acknowledge that he's a sniveling, lying sociopath.
I also now think that the reason why he hates Republicans began with Nixon. Not bc Nixon convinced him to leave Jehovah's Witness and kill in war, but bc Nixon negotiated a withdrawal from Vietnam and ended the war against "evil".
Right, SECOND?
So, yes: SECOND thinks he's Batman.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you act
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
Are we going to have to listen to you fucking goons freak out about the fucking market on a daily basis now?
Is he "stupid, erratic and weak" on economic policy like Paul Krugman said, or he is Nancy Pelosi like The Atlantic says?
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Shut. the. fuck. up.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Well.
Trumpis doing some things right, especially about illegal aliens.
I wish he had the same laser focus on the other things he's trying to accomplish, but he's making hash of his opportunities.
He seems to think he has to ... and can ... solve everything in 100 days. He acts like he has way more leverage than he does. And promising every day that "a deal" is just around the corner .... how stupid does he think we are?
Ukraine.
There's a long bad history of the west screwing with Russia: breaking promises, creating a color revolution, blowing up pipelines, torpedoing negotiations, waging covert war etc. Many reasons for Russia not to trust us. And Trump is in a no-win situation, because NO MATTER WHAT HE DOES, RUSSIA IS GOING TO WIN. So Trump isn't gonna get a cease fire in 1000 days, no matter how much he blusters and bullies. What Trump should do is just stop supporting Ukraine. Right now.
Ending globalization and tariffs.
I think tariffs are an essential part of remaking our economy. But not the ONLY part, and - again- it's not gonna happen in six months, or a year, or even two years. I think Russia did an EXEMPLARY job rebuilding its economy, from being a basket-case kleptocracy in 2000 to being a resilient nearly self-sufficient economy able to withstand everything the west could throw at it - militarily, economically, and financially, in 2022. BUT IT TOOK 22 YEARS TO GET THERE.
China has spent every year since 2008 trying to unhitch itself from the USA market... 15 YEARS. Can it survive an all-out trade war with the USA? I don't know. But CHINA IS A LOT MORE PREPARED THAN WE ARE.
So. Igniting a full-on trade war with China?.
Counterproductive.
Oh BTW... I dont give a fuck what happens to the stock market. Its been one big speculative bubble that the Fed refuses to let pop for over 20 years.
Saving money
The one thing that DOGE uncovered is that nobody really follows any sort of accounting practices. YOU CAN'T SAVE MONEY UNTIL YOU KNOW WHO IS BEING PAID, AND FOR WHAT. So until accounting practices have been followed for at least six months, it's hard to determine what to cut. Also ... a TRILLION DOLLAR DEFENSE BUDGET?
'If Trump breaks the economy he owns it... but if he fixes it, he owns that too' Problem is, NOBODY can fix an economy in two years.
If Trump breaks the economy, he'll lose Congress in two years. Fuck up bad enough, and Vance will lose the WH, and there will go our best chance at a rational national economic strategy. It's not just about Trump.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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This Is Why Dictatorships Fail
The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.
By Anne Applebaum | April 10, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/dictatorships-tru
mp-republicans/682387/
He blinked. But we don’t really know why.
Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.
The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.
This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.
From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.
But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Trump Paused the Tariffs
A stock-market swoon, or even a recession, might not frighten him, but the prospect of a 2008-style meltdown apparently still does.
By Jonathan Chait | April 9, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/why-trump-paused-
trade-war/682376/
Only yesterday, President Donald Trump was mocking Republicans nervous about his global trade war as “Panicans.” In a defiant speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he insisted, “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,” and that only he had the courage to defy “the globalists.”
But the globalists turn out to have had enough power to bring Trump to heel after all. This afternoon, the president announced a 90-day pause on what he has called his “reciprocal tariffs” against every country other than China.
According to Charlie Gasparino of Fox News, Trump retreated in the face of troubling developments in the bond market. Asked by reporters, Trump didn’t deny this, noting that, even with a “beautiful” bond market, “I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.” This was a completely new layer of danger that appeared overnight. Before yesterday evening, the interest rate on Treasury bonds had fallen slightly, a sign of increased demand as nervous investors retreated to the historically safe strategy of lending their savings to the U.S. government. Then, suddenly, investors began pulling money out, sensing that the U.S. government was no longer safe, a prospect that created the risk of everything from higher interest payments on the debt to a full-scale financial crisis.
All of this is to suggest that if a stock-market swoon, or even a recession, does not frighten Trump, the prospect of a 2008-style meltdown apparently still does. And so the gargantuan trade war is back off, for now.
Where does this leave the economy? The new 10 percent tariff on almost every good imported from every country not controlled by Vladimir Putin remains in place. This global flat tax on imports, it must be said, is much closer to the policy he campaigned on in 2024 than the confusing sampler platter of tariffs unveiled on Liberation Day.
That policy is, to be clear, quite harmful. Despite Trump’s rhetoric about reindustrialization, the universal tariff applies indiscriminately to almost every country and product. Some of those products, like coffee and bananas, cannot be practically grown in the United States, and will just get more expensive. Others, like metals and other industrial inputs, will make American manufacturing less competitive, not more.
The stock market surged after Trump’s “pause” announcement, but once the relief wears off, reality is likely to dull investors’ enthusiasm. Goldman Sachs, absorbing the news, has returned to its previous economic forecast, which calls for meager 0.5 percent economic growth this year and a 45 percent chance of recession. That is not the blinking-light disaster that the economy was facing before the pause, but it is still terrible, and much worse than the situation Trump inherited when he took office.
That’s one view, anyway. Within the MAGAverse, Trump’s latest pivot has been hailed as a masterstroke of economic statecraft. Treasury Secretary “Scott Bessent and I sat with the President while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency,” gushed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on X. (This is plausible, to be fair; “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency” is not exactly the highest bar.) The financier Bill Ackman, who had spent much of the past few days posting (and occasionally deleting) careful critiques of Trump’s tariffs, posted, “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”
What deal? Nobody has made a new trade agreement with Trump. To the contrary, other countries have found the administration unable to even articulate its goals or objectives, because Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs are the product of
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Trump’s Dumbest Order Is Hiding His Most Dangerous Rule Change Yet
Donald Trump snuck an insidious change into an executive order on showerheads.
By Edith Olmsted | April 10, 2025/10:42 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/193852/donald-trump-dangerous-rule-change
-executive-order
Buried within Donald Trump’s executive order “undoing the left’s war on water pressure” was a shady phrase to help the president fast-track his deregulatory crusade.
In a section of the order signed Wednesday repealing a 13,000-word regulation defining “showerhead,” Trump noted that notice and comment on the recission would not be accepted.
“Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal,” the order stated.
Notice-and-comment rulemaking, as outlined by the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, requires federal agencies to give the public time to comment after presenting a new rule. The agency must then consider all relevant, timely submitted comments before publishing the final rule.
But in his order, Trump implies that because he was the one rewriting the rule, the public would not be given the opportunity to comment, essentially fast-tracking any deregulation effort he pitches in the future.
Legal experts were quick to challenge Trump’s rulemaking rule change.
“This is so illegal. Just utterly, utterly unlawful,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in an X post Wednesday. “The President cannot overturn the commands of the APA by just declaring ‘because I said so.’”
“If President Biden could have written executive orders requiring rules just be written without comment, we’d have a whole helluva lot of new regulations on the books protecting consumers, workers, and the environment,” Todd Phillips, an assistant law professor at Robinson College of Business, wrote on X.
In a separate post, Phillips warned that rescissions would be challenged “so, so, so quickly. And in the D.C. Circuit.”
In a separate executive order signed Wednesday, Trump ordered U.S. agencies to get moving on rescinding “unlawful” regulations under several Supreme Court decisions, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, by once again skipping the process of notice and comment—this time claiming a “good cause” exception.
“In effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the ‘good cause’ exception in the Administrative Procedure Act,” the order stated. “That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be ‘impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.’”
In February, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement revoking its long-standing policy of using notice-and-comment rulemaking, which could potentially allow for expedited reforms to Medicaid programs.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How to destroy 80 years of monetary credibility in less than 3 months
By Paul Krugman | Apr 11, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-third-worlding-of-america
Oops, they’re doing it again. Major news media organizations sanewashed Donald Trump all through the 2024 campaign, cleaning up his incoherence and downplaying his extreme policy positions. Aaron Rupar reminds us of this:
Quote:It’s hard to know how much that contributed to his victory, but it must have been a factor.
Harris and Trump Embrace Tariffs, Though Their Approaches Differ
Both Democrats and Republicans are expressing support for tariffs to protect American industry, reversing decades of trade thinking in Washington.
But the desire to see Trump as reasonable is a more widely shared syndrome which isn’t confined to the media. It was abetted by the business world, which was gripped by “euphoria” after he won, despite clear signs that he would implement destructive economic policies.
Remarkably, the sanewashing continues despite the unprecedented craziness of the past 10 days. Many observers assert that Trump has backed down on tariffs and will speedily make a bunch of trade deals. The first assertion is just false, while the second is very unlikely.
In fact, savvy traders have realized that there’s no coherent economic strategy. There’s an old line about military analysis: “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals talk about logistics.” Well, when it comes to taking the pulse of financial markets, amateurs talk about stocks, but professionals talk about bond and currency markets. That’s because bond and currency markets are generally less driven by emotion. There’s no “meme gambling investing” in bond and currency markets. And these markets are both signaling major loss of faith in America.
First, about tariffs: It’s true that for the time being Trump has scaled back some of the tariffs displayed on his big piece of cardboard last week. For example, unless we have another policy swerve, the European Union will now face a 10 percent tariff over the next three months rather than a 20 percent tariff. But the tariff on China, our third-biggest trading partner after Canada and Mexico, has gone from 34 percent to more than 130 percent. And we still have high tariffs on steel, aluminum and so on. In effect, observers who claim that tariffs have gone down are missing the biggest part of the story.
Economists who have actually run the numbers, like those at the Yale Budget Lab, estimate that the April 9 tariff regime will raise consumer prices more than the April 2 regime because of the extraordinarily high tariff rate on Chinese imports. Specifically, the budget lab estimates that the latest version of Trump’s trade war will raise consumer prices by 2.9 percent. This is roughly ten times the probable impact of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.
It’s hard to overstate the craziness of announcing a radical tariff plan, then announcing a quite different but equally radical plan just a week later. Furthermore, the claim that the wild zigzags in policy were always part of Trump’s plan just adds to the destruction of the administration’s credibility.
But are these tariffs just an opening gambit for trade negotiations? I doubt it. Bear in mind that Trump and Peter Navarro, his tariff guru, start from the premise that other countries are cheating, that they’re taking advantage of America and treating us unfairly. In fact, however, most of them aren’t. Take the case of the European Union. The EU imposes an average tariff on U.S. goods of just 1.7%, and there aren’t any significant hidden barriers.
So what are we supposed to be negotiating about? Nations can’t promise to lower their trade barriers when there aren’t any barriers. Navarro has been claiming that value-added taxes are de facto tariffs, but they aren’t, and EU nations literally can’t afford to give them up.
I guess other countries might make fake concessions that Trump can claim as fake victories
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In posts published - and later deleted - on X and Instagram on Thursday, ICE declared that it would stop any "ideas" that tried to enter the U.S. "illegally." What idea is de-facto illegal in the United States? None, but that hasn't stopped the Trump administration from increasingly targeting individuals for detention and removal based on their ideology and political beliefs.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ice-pledges-stop-i
llegal-ideas-1235314913/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In posts published - and later deleted - on X and Instagram on Thursday, ICE declared that it would stop any "ideas" that tried to enter the U.S. "illegally." What idea is de-facto illegal in the United States? None, but that hasn't stopped the Trump administration from increasingly targeting individuals for detention and removal based on their ideology and political beliefs.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ice-pledges-stop-i
llegal-ideas-1235314913/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You're explaining the Joe Biden* administration here.
Or possibly Trudeau when they were locking up Canadian citizens.
Or any numerous European countries who have thrown people in prison for expressing online their problems with their countries being overrun by Muslims.
YOU are the bad guy here.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How to destroy 80 years of monetary credibility in less than 3 months
By Paul Krugman | Apr 11, 2025
Unless this is about how Joe Biden* added 1/4 of the $37 Trillion dollar debt in a single term, nobody wants to hear a fucking thing out of you, Paul.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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